CMake

“CMake works so well that companies such as Jetbrains developed their C++ IDEs around it”

“cmake just worked every time when I plugged in the toolchain file”

“In general, CMake is fast enough, the only slow bit on the critical path is detecting the toolchain.”

“CMake cache variables are individually settable and come with types and docstrings.”

“Cmake has been better but still sometimes cmake will pass and the code still doesn't build”

“we switched from CMake to a handrolled typescript build system and it made our builds faster and simpler”

“I hit an absolutely ludicrious number of errors for effectively a hello world”

“Naturally if you cannot be on latest compiler releases, or suffer from CMake phobia, the support isn't there.”

“I recommend you start by getting acquainted with CMake and its state of modules support.”

“instead of dealing with CMake and Autotools, I now have to deal with CMake, Autotools and Meson”

“CMake as a language makes PHP look good. Whenever I have to use it, there's a whole lot of warnings and often errors, too.”

“CMake does three main things: Compilation with dependency tracking, finding external dependencies, and platform-independence.”

“CMake has a tremendous user mass, so you do want to be able to use a CMake-based project as a dependency.”

“Cmake is starting to get all the possible weirdness right without scripts”

“CMake is a combination of a warthog of a specification language, and mechanisms for handling a zillion idiosyncracies and corners cases of everything.”

“take advantage of what CMake is good at while making the more difficult operations easier”

“I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language”

“As much of a dog as cmake is, "just use make!" does not solve many of the problems that cmake makes a go at.”

“Cmake itself exists because a lot of humans haven't bothered to read the gnu make manual, and added more cruft to manage this.”

“Cmake has a lot of warts, but they have also put a lot of effort into finding and fixing all those weird special cases.”

“CMakes piles up various generations of idioms so there are multiple ways of doing it”

“That's why meta-build-systems like cmake were created, not to be a better GNU Make.”

“tons of accumulated workarounds for all the different host operating systems, compiler toolchains and IDEs”

“All the main build tools (cmake, meson/ninja and GNU configure) have different benefits”

“I thought I knew a lot of CMake, but file sets definitely make things a lot simpler.”

“it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like”

“Build time went from 10 minutes to 2 minutes and now we have ability just to build what has changed.”

“CMake only reruns, when CMakeLists.txt has changed. That doesn't happen a lot after the core of the project has been set up for me.”

“Both of these alternatives use a build system I can trust over randomgithubproject.exe”

“just installing LLVM, CMake and Ninja is enough to get started developing on Windows”

“We've come a long way to replace simple Makefile with autotools (incredible monstrocity), cmake, ninja etc.”

“To match the npm or pip model you'd go with nix or guix or cmake and you'd vendor everything”

“Getting all of LLVM mesa linux cmake ninja glibc gcc binutils xorg KDE to work is more work than in 2005 or 2010.”

“I'd recommend that you use CMake with a CMake toolchain file targeting Winelib”

“CMake doesn't spark joy, but it's not something you need to touch constantly.”

“cmake, npm, pip, maven, etc. all live in this realm where any invocation could become a time purgatory.”

“CMake is quite crufty, but there's toolchains for every system under the Sun”

“All these started with pure declarative DSL then incrementally created a nightmarish imperative monstrosity.”

“I find CMake intensely offensive, just the whole worldview of every tool demanding you learn some DSL to do basic things”

“Even with the weird configuration language it has, it's still preferable to the horrible agglomeration of m4 macros”